


you’ll carry this for life (you have my sympathy)

by shineyma



Series: a storm you're starting [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Kid Fic, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 15:38:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4570023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No lexicon in any language, on any <em>planet</em>, contains a single word that could even hope to describe what she’s feeling</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. dream a different ending

**Author's Note:**

> First off, I don't wanna tell you how to live your life, but I **strongly** suggest that you read this as two separate chapters, instead of hitting 'entire work' and reading it as one long fic. I'm posting this as one fic because I didn't feel comfortable leaving things as they stand at the end of chapter one, but this is definitely a fic and a follow-up combined. If you read them as one, it'll lose a lot of the punch, which would be sad, I think.
> 
> Second! This is not **the** sequel to _life was never worse (but never better)_ , it is **a** sequel. There are about twenty different ways things could go after that fic, and, as I genuinely can't choose which one I like best, I already have plans to write about two of the others. So if you don't like this one, don't worry! Other options are available!
> 
> Third! There are the potential for **death-related triggers** in this fic; if you are concerned--or if you become concerned while reading--you can skip to the end notes for details. Please take care!
> 
> Title is from Icon for Hire's _Only a Memory_. Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!

Jemma doesn’t know how long she spends on the lab’s floor. Long enough for the cold of the tile to seep through her jeans, at least—long enough for her knees to ache.

Not long enough for her tears to slow. Perhaps they never will.

Her head throbs as she nudges Skye—who’s been holding her this whole time—away and pushes to her feet. She wavers as she stands; the hole in her chest has left her off-balance, and the weight on her shoulders seeks to force her back to the ground.

Sometime during her breakdown, Coulson took the opportunity to replace the sheet she removed. It makes no difference; the sight of the body—the empty corpse—beneath is seared into her retinas. It will follow her, she’s certain, for the rest of her life, always at the forefront of her mind.

There’s a coldness in her, a horrible clarity laid over top of her storm of emotion. She wishes it weren’t—wishes she could hide from this, pretend that it’s all a horrid nightmare, something from which she’ll wake any moment.

But it’s not.

“Jemma,” Skye starts, voice timid and uncertain. “I—”

“Where’s Grant?” she asks, cutting through whatever sympathy Skye was about to offer.

She doesn’t want it.

Skye and Coulson exchange a look—perhaps at the question, or perhaps merely at the use of _Grant_ instead of _Ward_ —but she ignores it.

“Did he get away?” she presses.

“No,” Coulson says, after a long moment. “He was—” He hesitates. “—distracted, and we were able to subdue him. He’s back in Vault D.”

“He can’t hurt you anymore,” Skye says earnestly.

Jemma laughs hollowly. As though _anything_ could harm her.

(There’s nothing left of her to be harmed.)

“Distracted,” she murmurs. She supposes that’s one word for it.

“We had to ICER him,” Skye says. “I don’t think he even noticed when we cuffed him; he just kept trying to kill the Izmaylovs.”

She’s babbling, a little—speaking to fill the silence, nothing more.

Jemma lays her hand over the sheet—over the tiny, tiny body it covers.

Cameron. Her sweet baby boy. Barely four years old.

He’ll never reach five.

“You should have let him,” she says, past the lump in her throat.

“Jemma,” Coulson says slowly, clearly uncomfortable. His eyes track to the observer in the corner, a severe, frowning man who has been introduced only as Agent Gonzales. “I know you’re hurting, but—”

“ _Hurting_ ,” she interrupts, “does not begin to cover it.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You have every right to whatever you’re feeling, and I am so, so sorry for everything that’s happened. But—I’m sorry—you can’t let your grief make your decisions for you.”

 _Grief_ doesn’t begin to cover it, any more than _hurting_ did. There’s no word for it—no lexicon in any language, on any _planet_ , contains a single word that could even hope to describe what she’s feeling.

Nothing can communicate the gaping emptiness in her, the hollow nothing will ever fill. The hollow where her sweet Cameron should be, smiling at her and calling her Mummy and asking questions about _everything_ in his quiet, intent way.

She’s still crying.

“I want to see him,” she says, addressing the words to the sheet-covered body—her _son’s_ sheet-covered body—instead of Coulson and Skye. “I want to see Grant.”

“Jemma—”

“Are you sure that’s—”

“Please,” she says over their hesitant protests. “Please.”

“Let her go,” Gonzales says. “She has a right to confront him.” His words are kind, but his eyes are calculating as they watch her. “After all this time.”

Skye looks to Coulson, a plea on her face, and he nods slowly.

“Okay,” he says. Jemma thought, when she first woke in the infirmary, that he seemed to have aged decades in the years since she last saw him. He looks even older now. “If that’s what you want.”

“It is,” she confirms.

“I’ll take you down,” Skye offers. “Come on.”

She doesn’t want to leave. She needs to see Grant, but she—

How can she leave Cameron?

Coulson seems to sense her hesitation; he comes up beside her and lays a warm hand on her shoulder. “I’ll stay here.”

She swallows back a sob.

“Thank you,” she manages. She bends over the table, pulls back the sheet, and presses a kiss to her son’s ice cold forehead. “I’ll be back soon, my darling. I love you.”

Her voice breaks on it. Perhaps that’s why Skye holds her hand all the way down to the Vault—or perhaps it’s merely sentiment.

She doesn’t suppose it matters.

The Playground hasn’t changed in the last five years. It’s still cold, still bare brick and mortar, still far too large for the small operation that occupies it. They don’t see another soul in the corridors—though that might be design, rather than a result of the base’s size.

She hasn’t asked about Fitz or May or Trip. She’s wondered about them, over the years—has always imagined their reunion as joyous, has pictured throwing herself at all of them in hugs that last for ages.

Has dreamt of introducing them to her Cameron.

Too late now.

Grant, when they reach Vault D, is pacing in his tiny cell. His face is contorted in a cold rage, one that promises no end of death and destruction.

He stops when he sees her, though. “Jemma.”

“Grant.” The walk from the bottom of the stairs to the barrier seems to take years, for all that it’s only a few feet. Skye sticks close to her side.

“Are you hurt?” he asks. There’s a tension in his jaw she learned years ago to fear, but it doesn’t make her flinch. Not this time.

“Yes,” she says simply, and leaves it at that.

He closes his eyes. He’s feeling what she is, she knows. He’s the only person in the base—in the _world_ —who could possibly even begin to understand.

It’s why she’s here.

“I hate you,” she says, and his eyes open. “I hate you—” She drags in a shuddering breath. “—so much.”

“Jemma—”

“You terrorized me,” she says. “You kept me prisoner for years, isolated me from my family and friends. Forced me into working for HYDRA. Held my own _son_ hostage against my good behavior.” The word _son_ comes out on a sob, but it’s not to be helped. She keeps going. “I hate you. I hated you when you first walked into that hospital room and I hate you now.”

Skye is hovering at her elbow. She means to be reassuring, but Jemma regrets her presence.

“I hate you,” she says again. “But…”

She fists her hands, feels the bite of her wedding ring against her palm. A ring he forced on her, part of the twisted fantasy she’s been made to participate in for the last four years. She hated it—the ring—at first, hated it for months. But Cameron is fascinated with it. He sits in her lap and spins it around and around and around on her finger for ages, smiling and laughing.

And how can she hate something that brings her son happiness?

Grant is watching her, eyes dark. She hates those eyes, hates that there are times she _doesn’t_ hate him. They’ve lived together too long, shared too much, for her feelings to be anything approaching simple. She hates him and fears him, yes, but she also loves and desires him—and with the passing of years, the latter have begun to outweigh the former.

This, too, is undefinable, but in the absence of truly accurate vocabulary? It’s a mess.

It’s all such a mess.

“But you’re not the person I hate most in the world,” she says. “Not anymore.”

He tips his head, acknowledging that he knows exactly what she’s talking about. But he doesn’t speak.

In any other version of this situation, she’s certain he’d have plenty to say. Threats, intimations, dangerous endearments. In any other circumstances, she’d be trembling. She’d fear him, even with the barrier between them. That’s the power he has, the influence he holds over her after four years together.

Today, however, she’s steady. She’s not afraid.

“I—” She pauses, thins her lips as she fights back another sob. “I don’t—”

She has to turn away from him, from his fixed, furious gaze, and she finds herself facing Skye.

Skye, whose eyes are wet with tears of her own. Skye who held her while she sobbed, who helped her out of her infirmary bed and brought her to the makeshift morgue to say goodbye to her son.

She’s missed Skye terribly. Every day.

But she found joy without her—without Fitz, without Trip, without _SHIELD_.

And now that joy has been stolen from her.

It firms her resolve.

“I can’t do this,” she tells Skye. “I can’t—I can’t even breathe.”

Skye folds her in a hug at once, arms tight around her and so determined to be comforting. Part of Jemma feels bad for this, but it’s a tiny part, sectioned off behind a wall of ice.

Her son is dead. She will do what she must.

So she uses the hug to hide her movements as she draws the ICER that’s tucked in the waistband of Skye’s jeans and, when she pulls away, shoots her before she has a chance to react.

“I’m sorry,” Jemma says, as Skye crumples to the ground. It’s a lie, though she wishes it weren’t. “This is the only way.”

Grant’s eyes burn through her as she steps over Skye to reach the stand that holds the control tablet.

“I hate you,” she says, yet again, as she turns to face him. “But I hate the people that murdered our son much, much more.”

“I’ll tear them to pieces,” he swears, face terrifyingly intent. “They’ll die screaming, Jemma, I can promise you that.”

From him, she expects nothing less.

She _wants_ nothing less.

“They’ve been taken into government custody,” she says, repeating what she was told when she first woke. “Apparently, Coulson didn’t feel that they would be safe in the Playground.”

“I’ll find them,” Grant says. His tone is one that would make her shiver on any other day—one that _has_ made her shiver, that has sent her fleeing from him on more than one occasion.

She’s never seen him this angry before, not in all of their acquaintance. Not when he was under the influence of the berserker staff. Not when he was pretending betrayal over John Garrett’s status as the Clairvoyant. Not even after her third escape attempt, the one in which she and Cameron actually got out of the building. They made it six whole miles away before her guards caught up with her, and when they brought her back—

She shakes off the memory.

“SHIELD aren’t the ones at fault here,” she says. “You leave them be.”

“I will,” he agrees. “But only on my way out. If they try to interfere—to save the Izmaylovs—then all bets are off.”

“Fair enough,” she says, and drops the barrier.

Grant takes three steps and catches her up in his arms. A sob wells up in her throat as she buries her face in his chest.

She’s been comforted by his embrace before. When Cameron was sickly as an infant, when HYDRA mused on the possible effects their combined alien encounters might have had on Cameron’s DNA, when an attack on their base nearly left her dead—his arms were strong and reassuring and she, often despite herself, was soothed.

But she wasn’t holding out much hope that it would help today, and it doesn’t.

“I am going,” he says, slowly and deliberately, “to kill them all.” His grip is bruising. “And then I’m gonna come back for you, because we’re not done.”

That should frighten her. That should absolutely frighten her. But Cameron’s voice is ringing in her ears, the high, terrified _Mummy!_ he shouted just before she was knocked unconscious.

Perhaps his very last word. _Dada_ was his first, and she resented it then, but oh—

“I don’t care what you do after you kill them,” she says. “As long as they die.”

He draws away from her, tips her chin up.

“They will,” he promises, and then kisses her.

It’s fierce—punishing.

It doesn’t make her feel anything at all.


	2. how damaged you must be

Some time later finds Jemma in Coulson’s office. There’s an angry debate waging, Coulson and Skye and May pitted against Gonzales and Agent Weaver (her presence would be a shock, were Jemma capable of feeling anything) and a man Jemma doesn’t know.

They’re trying to decide what to do with her, how to respond to what Gonzales calls her betrayal—releasing Grant.

She’s not listening, really. What does she care what happens next? There’s nothing they can do to her that can be worse than what’s happened. No torture or imprisonment can compare to what she’s lost.

“He’s all alone,” she says to herself. Coulson promised to stay with Cameron, but Coulson is here.

“He’s not,” Trip promises. He’s sitting in front of her, tending to the stitches in her shoulder. She tore them at some point, it seems; she’s not sure when, as she never even noticed them. “Fitz is with him.”

“Oh,” she says. “Good.”

Cameron has always wanted to meet Fitz. Jemma’s told him about him, of course, quiet whispers and bedtime stories about his Uncle Leo, her lost brother. Cameron loves those stories. Grant doesn’t, not at all, but she’s remained firm; he may dictate her life in every other way, but she will not be swayed in how she speaks to her son.

Spoke. _Spoke_ to her son.

Her breath hitches in her chest, earning her a worried frown from Trip.

“Did that hurt?” he asks. “I can give you more lidocaine.”

She’s confused until she looks down and sees that he’s just started re-suturing her wound.

“No,” she says, eyes on the injury. It’s low on her shoulder—very nearly her collarbone—exactly where Cameron used to rest his head as an infant, on all those sleepless nights as she paced his nursery, holding him and trying to soothe his distressed tears. “I didn’t feel it.”

He doesn’t appear reassured, but a sudden surge in the argument happening around Coulson’s desk distracts them both. It seems the debate has moved on, away from her punishment and onto whose fault her actions were.

“And he was _right_ , wasn’t he?” the man she doesn’t know is demanding of Coulson. “The first thing she did was release one of HYDRA’s most dangerous—”

“No,” May scoffs. “The _first_ thing she did was cry over her son.”

There’s a brief lull in the argument as both sides eye May warily. She’s clearly enraged—far more than Jemma would have expected—and whatever else is happening here, it appears everyone is smart enough to fear her temper.

“She’s right,” Skye says eventually, turning a scowl on Gonzales. “This is on _you_ , not Jemma.”

 _That_ sets the argument off again, but Jemma lets the sound wash over her without truly absorbing it. She’s turning Skye and May’s words over in her mind, searching for the connection between the two statements. How do her tears over Cameron absolve her of her guilt in setting Grant free?

She doesn’t care, really. She doesn’t care about the argument, May’s rage, or Skye’s defense. But of all the things she might think about right now, this is the least painful.

Before she can puzzle out the connection, she’s jolted out of her thoughts by Coulson’s use of the name _Izmaylovs_.

“—aren’t good people,” he’s saying, “but they don’t deserve what Ward is going to do to them, and that’s—”

Rage brings Jemma to her feet so quickly she knocks her chair over, and the room goes dead silent at the sound it makes when it strikes the floor.

“Don’t deserve?” she bites out. She’s hot all over; her blood may well be boiling, to hear Coulson speak such betrayal. “ _Don’t deserve_?”

“Jemma—”

“Did my son _deserve_ what they did to him?” she asks. She thinks she might shout it, but she can’t be certain; she can barely hear her own voice over the roaring in her ears. “Did he _deserve_ to be murdered? To bleed out, alone and terrified, with no one to—no one to—”

She stutters to a halt as grief rises up to choke her. Coulson seems to have aged even further at her words, while Skye is looking away.

She can’t breathe. She thought, once, that she knew what drowning felt like—understood the lancing, burning pain in her lungs, the desperation, the way vision faded, how the world narrowed to a light above her and a weight below her and the knowledge that she _must not stop_ —but she was wrong.

How can she go on?

The office is still silent. Trip is standing now, too, a warmth at her back that might as well be in another country, for the impact he has on the ice that’s closed over her once more.

She reaches for the rage of a moment ago—surely that was better—but finds nothing.

“He’s just a baby,” she manages. “And they—”

“They didn’t.”

It’s May’s voice, sharp and furious, and, unexpectedly, it comes from behind her. She must have left the office at some point while Jemma was distracted.

“Di—”

 _Didn’t what_ , she means to ask, but the words die on her lips as she turns to face the door. Her feet waver beneath her—or perhaps the _world_ does. Her throat closes up tight.

“Mummy!” Cameron wails, reaching for her from May’s arms, and—

The next thing she knows she’s on her knees, clinging to Cameron as tightly as she dares while he sobs into her neck. She’s crying, too, weeping between kisses pressed to his hair and reassuring, nonsense babble.

She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand at all, but he’s here and he’s real and he’s _alive_ , her baby, shaking in her arms, tiny heart racing against her chest.

There’s a thought niggling at the back of her mind, a realization waiting to be had, but she can’t focus long enough to bring it to the forefront—any more than she can stop counting Cameron’s breaths to listen to the shouting match that’s resumed behind her.

Eventually, Cameron’s tears subside into sniffling, and Jemma forces herself to swallow down the rest of her own. She can’t bring herself to let go of him—to pull back to meet his eyes—so she taps her fingers against his back to indicate that she needs him to listen.

“Are you hurt, darling?” she asks, pitching her voice to be soothing—to not convey any of her terror or confused grief.

He sniffles. “My head hurts, and my tummy. I dun like it here, I wanna go home.”

She bites her lip at the slur in the middle of his sentence, the _don’t_ becoming _dun_. It’s been months since she heard him do that, and while it was adorable before, she doesn’t like it in conjunction with a possible head injury.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she says, careful to keep her voice calm. “Does your head hurt very awfully?”

He nods against her neck, but before she can panic too badly, there’s a hand on her back, and then Trip’s voice in her ear.

“He’s fine,” he says. “Checked him over myself. He’s got a good lump going and some bruising on his stomach, but nothing serious and nothing permanent.”

Relief makes her throat tight, and she exhales slowly.

“Thank you, Trip,” she says.

Still, she’d rather see for herself. She starts to ease back, but stops when Cameron tightens his grip on her with a whimper that both tears at and lifts her heart—the former because he’s distressed, and the latter because he’s alive to—

Alive.

He’s _alive_.

Realization dawns, and several pieces of a puzzle she didn’t know she was solving slot into place.

A curtain of fury falls over her, smothering grief and relief both. She thought she was angry, before, when Coulson ( _Coulson_ ) said that the Izmaylovs don’t deserve the fate they’ll suffer, but in the face of this bonfire, that was barely a match.

Motherhood has made her more graceful; it’s easy to stand and turn to face the rest of the room without losing her grip on Cameron. His hold on her tightens even further as she settles him on her hip, but that’s his only reaction. His sniffling has ended, now, and his breathing is starting to deepen. He’ll be asleep soon, which is just as well—she doesn’t want him to hear this.

What to say, though, she has no idea. How can she even begin to confront this, to demand explanations for this betrayal—the worst she’s ever faced? Any and all of Grant’s crimes pale in comparison to _this_ , to her own team deliberately leading her to believe her son dead whilst knowing very well he wasn’t.

Perhaps there’s nothing _to_ say. So she lets her expression speak for her.

And it must speak volumes, if Coulson’s wince is any indication.

“Jemma,” he says, and then falters. Skye isn’t meeting her eyes at all, and nor, when she looks at him, can Trip.

Agent Weaver, however, returns her gaze with no trouble at all.

“We had no choice,” she says gravely.

“No?” she asks. There will be hurt later, she thinks, because she has mourned this woman, has missed her guidance and cried for the death she assumed she suffered during the uprising, but right now, there’s nothing in her but anger. “You had no choice but to let me believe—to _tell_ me and to _show_ me—that my son had suffered a terrible death?”

“We had to be certain of your loyalties,” Weaver says.

“My loyalties?” Jemma asks on an incredulous laugh. “What could _killing my son_ tell you of my loyalties? Why are they even in _doubt_?”

“You work for HYDRA,” Gonzales says, drawing her attention. His face is entirely unsympathetic; if he cares at all for the distress he’s caused her, he doesn’t show it. “You were sent in as a spy, but in five years we haven’t received a single piece of intelligence from you.”

Unbelievable. “My son’s life was at risk.”

“Yes, that argument was made in your favor,” he acknowledges. “It’s a valid defense, but one that needed to be tested. So we removed your son as a factor.”

“And you agreed to this?” she asks, casting a scathing glance at Coulson.

“It was his idea,” Weaver says.

“No,” Coulson disagrees at once. “I lied to Ward—and even _that_ was a spur-of-the-moment plan to keep him from _killing us all_.” Though his words are angry, his eyes are sad and sincere as they meet Jemma’s once more. “I never intended on drawing the deception out at all, let alone extending it to you.”

“Then _why did you_?” she demands. There was nothing spur-of-the-moment about the lie she was told; they had a _very_ convincing corpse ready and waiting when she regained consciousness and demanded to see Cameron. That wasn’t impulse, it was _planned_.

“We were outvoted,” May says. She doesn’t look angry any longer; she looks tired.

“Outvoted?” Jemma asks. “Has there been a coup in my absence? You’re the bloody Director!”

“We’ve got a council, now,” Skye says. She still can’t meet Jemma’s eyes. “Just like the old SHIELD.”

The old SHIELD’s council fired a nuclear missile at Manhattan, but Jemma is too furious to point out how stupid they’re being in falling back into old habits.

Let them destroy themselves. Gonzales was wrong to doubt her loyalties before, but now? After _this_?

“And how,” she asks, “was letting me think Cameron dead meant to prove anything?”

“The need to ensure your son’s well-being might influence your actions even here, in safety,” Weaver says. “And so we led you to believe him deceased and waited to see what you would do.”

“And what you did,” Gonzales says, voice heavy with judgment, “was release our prisoner.” He gives the man Jemma doesn’t know—who has been nearly silent, thus far—a smug look. “It appears the question of your loyalties has been answered.”

Only Cameron, nearly asleep in her arms, keeps Jemma from striking Gonzales. The sheer nerve of him!

“I released him to kill the men who killed our son,” she says. She’s still so furious that her voice shakes with it. “If I had known Cameron was alive, I never would have done it.”

“Easy to say that now,” Weaver says. “However, I’m afraid we simply can’t take your word for it.”

That draws a flurry of protests from Skye, Coulson, Trip, and even May, and for a moment, it seems as though the earlier argument will resume. But Jemma has had enough of their bickering; she’s in no mood to listen to another round of it.

“I hope you realize,” she says, loud enough that the others fall silent, “that Grant is going to kill you for this.”

Gonzales scowls, but Coulson and May trade heavy looks that tell her the thought has already occurred to them.

“Regardless of what happens next,” she says, “to me _or_ to Cameron, sooner or later, Grant will learn that he’s still alive. And when that happens, he will burn SHIELD to the ground to get him back.”

It’s a thought that would have terrified her just this morning, but now?

Now, she only hopes she’s there to see it happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ta-da? *hides*
> 
> If you're especially distressed by the angst of this fic, may I recommend JD's [ask me no questions (and i'll tell you no lies)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4565649) and Mir's [i'll worship like a dog (at the shrine of your lies)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4569534) for pick-me-ups? They'll make you feel MUCH better, I promise! :D

**Author's Note:**

>  **Spoilers for potential triggers** : This fic takes place in the aftermath of child death. The death isn't described at all, but the fic does deal with the emotional fall-out, especially chapter one. Chapter two reveals that the death was faked.


End file.
